Nitro turbocharges global expansion with $US15m funding

Wednesday, 05 November 2014

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 5, 2014, Sydney Morning Herald -- He readily admits not having much of a life outside work, but that is about to change for Sam Chandler, single, 33, former high-school entrepreneur from Tasmania turned Silicon Valley darling.

He's just convinced serious US investors to pump $US15 million ($17.2 million) into his start-up, a little over a year after raising $US6.5 million.

Nitro - the company whose mascot is a rocket-propelled wombat - is now on the way to doubling its workforce to 320 and turbo-charging its operations in Dublin and San Francisco.

"It's pretty exciting for us. We're over the moon," Chandler said from the US on Tuesday.

Chandler launched Nitro PDF in Melbourne in 2005 as a document alternative to Adobe Acrobat which he thought was akin to giving people paper but not a pen to annotate it.

The company is now embarking on what Chandler calls its second chapter, moving from providing digital documents to enabling "smart sharing" of documents within corporations - a sort of process streamliner that fast-tracks approvals, permissions and collaboration in otherwise slow and bureaucratic organisations.

Michael Brown, general partner at Battery and now a board member at Nitro, said the investors saw "significant market opportunity" in the company's plans.

Anthony Glenning at Starfish Ventures, Nitro's first investor, said the new backing proved Nitro was "one of Australia's great technology success stories".